Eyes Up, Jane Shepard
by periferal
Summary: On Alchera, a small piece of a dying machine-god finds what remains of Jane Shepard. Once awake, she must find out who killed her and use her new powers to save her world. Guardian!Shepard in a Mass Effect context, AU of ME2, eventual Liara/Shepard
1. A Paperweight

_The primary guiding idea of this fic is that most individual reapers are probably weaker as a whole than a Destiny Raid Boss, and that you could technically solo Crota in 1 before they patched it to make that impossible. _

_The title is a play on the very first lines Ghost speaks to you, while the chapter titles are from the Sylvia Plath poem _Lady Lazarus_. _

* * *

The small white shape blinked in apparent distress as it flitted from point to point, occasionally emitting a beam of light from one of its flat surfaces. What could have once been a human being lay in a scattered heap.

"You'll do," a mechanical voice chirruped frantically from nowhere. "You'll do."

A final flash of light and a human shape formed, landing on its feet before bending over, coughing.

"Guardian," the small machine floating in front of her said. Despite its lack of a face, Jane could swear it was nervous. "Guardian, we need to get off this planet."

Jane coughed. That she had a body to cough with seemed like a new development. "I agree. What are you?" This was, perhaps, the wrong time for questions, but abruptly setting off in a random direction would not help her any more than just spending a moment getting her bearings.

This was, presumably, Alchera. Jane was not as cold as she expected to be; she breathed easily enough, despite knowing that this was not an atmosphere built for humans. She brought her hand up to her face. Right, she was still in her armor. Looking down at herself, she realized she was unarmed, her armor busted up to a worrying degree.

The typical HUD was barely functional, showing a markedly diminished capacity. The self-repairing mechanism was broken, somehow.

Her memories returned to her rapidly, leaving her coughing again.

"I'm a ghost," the small machine said. "More properly, I'm _your_ ghost." As it continued to move around her, Jane noticed her armor healing itself. Was that its doing?

"I don't know what that is," Jane admitted. "Are you Geth or Reaper tech?" She was far enough from any Alliance world to rule that possibility out, and the thing's aesthetic was too square to be most exported Asari tech and too streamlined to be anything else.

"I don't know what that is," the Ghost said, parroting her words. "I have an idea from your memories, but they don't make any sense. Where is this?"

This was what she was doing, then: twenty questions with a small robot. Excellent. "Alchera," Jane said. "What am I doing here?"

"You were dead. I fixed that."

"You brought me back?"

"Yes. Now, we need to go."

"Do you have a name?" Another badly timed question, but Jane could not continue thinking of it as the ghost, or the little machine. The whole situation was spooky enough already.

The ghost blinked at her for a moment. "You can call me Nox," it said, finally. "Do you?"

"Jane Shepard," she said. She smiled unthinkingly, pleased despite herself when that didn't mean anything at all to Nox.

Alchera was a desert planet, all dry ice and cold, blue light. Walking, Jane heard the faint crunch of small amounts of ice breaking under her feet.

That she was not cold was slightly less disconcerting by the second. She was still in her armor. It made sense.

"What are the Geth?" Nox asked.

"A machine-race," Jane said. "They worship the Reapers." How old was Nox, or how isolated? Not knowing about the reapers made sense. Despite Jane's best efforts, they were still a myth to too many people. The geth, however, were well known, if only as a warning against doing what the Quarians did.

"Those are the source of all the screaming?"

Jane stopped. "Excuse me?"

"The screaming," Nox repeated. "In your head."

Her visions from the Prothean artifacts. "Yes," she said. "They are."

"We don't have those, where I'm from, I think." Nox disappeared in a puff of light, but Jane realized she was still aware of its presence. It was just less physical, suddenly. Within her was a bad way to phrase it, but how else could she describe it?

She felt a presence, its presence, brush against her mind. "Where are you from?" she asked.

"Somewhere else," it answered. It sounded frustrated. "I'm not being mysterious on purpose. I just don't know how to explain it. Are you human?"

That question surprised Jane enough to make her laugh.

"Yes," she said. "You have humans, where you're from?"

"We've broadened the definition, a bit, but basically, yeah."

Jane spent the first hour of her long walk sharing information back and forth with Nox.

"Do you need to get back?" Jane asked, once they had sufficiently caught each other up. "Things sound pretty dire, where you're from."

"I don't know," Nox said. It sounded almost sad for a moment. "I'm just one ghost." It materialized, flickering back and forth in front of Jane's face. "You're my guardian," it said. "Or, well, lightbearer, anyway. I feel like you should help your universe first."

Jane smiled. "That's nice of you."

"So, basically, we have to punch the Reapers really, really hard, right?" it asked. It floated down in an almost tragic motion. "If only I was the Guardian's ghost."

The word, which had been a title when it first addressed her with it, now sounded like a name. "The Guardian?"

"The most powerful Guardian ever rezzed." Joy noted with some surprise that Nox's tone was almost… gleeful. "I wonder what element you can use, anyway? I don't even know what you'd be! I thought I'd know." It blinked, once. "This is exciting!"

Nox had mentioned a guardian's abilities alongside its summary of every alien species that wanted humanity dead in its universe (and there was an astonishing amount, even after the First Contact War and everything else, humanity had not made that many enemies).

Jane had yet to have a reason to use hers, assuming she did have any, this far from this so-called Traveler.

She had been, until this moment, alone. Alchera was neither resource rich enough for frequent mining missions nor hospitable enough for colonies—the atmosphere was wrong even for Vorcha—and so she had assumed it would be a while before she found a way off planet. Her plan, and it was not very well though out, was to find the wreckage of the Normandy and see if she could use some remnant of its comm system. She definitely did not expect to come upon, for example, what appeared to be a temporary Blue Sun mercenary group base, not even trying to hide itself.

They had not, it seemed, posted any guards, but as she did not exactly try to hide her approach she was quickly noticed. The base was not exactly large, but Jane immediately noticed the ship. Smaller by far than the Normandy, it could at least, she thought, get her into orbit, and would have a comms unit with enough range to let her find at least someone friendly.

Jane imagined she did not look particularly threatening. She had to hope that in her case, appearances were at least somewhat deceiving.

A person in heavy armor confronted Jane almost immediately, getting in her face in a way that would have been intimidating if Jane hadn't already been in this kind of situation way too much. "Who the fuck are you?" she asked. She wore a helmet that was clear over the eyes. "We were told there wasn't anyone else on this shithole of a planet."

Jane held up her hands placatingly, showing that she was unarmed. "I'm Jane Shepard," she said. "I want to get off this shithole of a planet."

The woman took a step back and raised her gun. "That's impossible," she said. "Jane Shepard's dead, and we're here to collect her body."

Jane smiled. "It seems," she said. "You've been preempted."

The woman fired in tandem with the other mercenaries who were already out of the habitats, but before their bullets could hit Jane, she pushed her hands upwards, following an instinct she did not know she had. A purple barrier formed itself around her, emanating from her hands, and stopped the projectiles in their tracks, dissolving them into nothing.

"You're a Titan!" Nox said. Jane had no idea what that meant, but it seemed to delight her ghost.

The hail of bullets stopped for a moment as the woman looked as though she was about to flee, then started up again. "Oh, great," Jane said. "Just what I needed."

Reaching out of her little bubble of safety, she pulled the woman inside it, punching her in the side of her head, her fist glowing with light the same color as the barrier, her other hand pulling her gun out of her now-limp grip.

The bubble would stop her bullets going out as well, she thought, but she was armed now, which was an improvement under any circumstance.

"I don't want to kill you," she said. "I really, really don't. Just tell me who hired you and get me out of here, and we never have to deal with each other again." She raised the shotgun.

To her disappointment, if not surprise, the other mercs fired on her. That, at least, gave her an idea of how high the price on her corpse was. Jane barreled out of the protective cover of the purple barrier towards the closest merc, shooting him in the chest with slugs she instinctively coated in biotic energy. It seemed, despite her new, more purple abilities, she still had access to that. Good.

It didn't take very long for her to kill the rest, grabbing a pistol from one of the other bodies. She had a feeling that she wouldn't need it, really, but she felt better this way.

"Damn," she said. She took a moment to laugh breathlessly. "That was almost fun." She felt a little bad about the dead mercs, as always, but she had given them a chance. That none of them had taken a look at the supposedly dead woman with the spooky purple biotics (as she assumed they would interpret the whole light show) and thought maybe the money's not worth it this one time meant her conscience was, all things considered, relatively clear.

"Void light!" Nox said. "I didn't know if that would even work out here!"

"I'm still not sure what the fuck that was," she said.

"We're as far from the Traveler as you could ever be, but it still works!" Nox sounded delighted and like it was talking mostly to itself. "If that's not proof, I don't know what is."

"Proof of what?"

It stopped its movement. "Nothing," it said. "More importantly, you have a ship. Can you fly?"

"Yes."

Not as well as Joker, but this ship was a great deal smaller than the Normandy, and looked to be much less complicated to pilot. She could call someone and wait to be picked up, but that would probably just mean more mercs. She had been really lucky that none of them were biotics, and she would have to be careful that there was no one on board or still hiding somewhere.

"Can I take a direct hit?"

"How do you mean?"

"If someone shot me in the shoulder, would it slow me down?"

"You're still human," Nox said. It sounded worried, all of a sudden. "You'll still die if someone drives a spike into your head, or cuts you open with a sword. I can bring you back, of course, but it hurts."

"That's good to know, but that's not my question. Am I more durable?" Could she, if she wanted to, ignore people shooting at her as she made off with their ship, for example?

"Yes," Nox said.

"Excellent."

Making her way into the ship was less of an ordeal than she feared it would be. Her omnitool still functioned, and faced with the door mechanism Nox chirped, "You know, I can open that for you."

"You can?"

It sounded almost proud of itself. "I am a machine. I'm good at talking to other machines."

"We don't really make our machines able to talk," Jane said. "That led to problems, the last time."

As Nox investigated the lock, Jane realized that there was no explanation for her ghost she could come up with that would not piss off someone important, or worse, attract someone's interest.

The door opened slowly, and Nox flitted back to Jane's hand, vanishing again.

It did not take Jane very long to figure out the controls, especially with Nox's help. Even better, in the ship's weapons locker she found a rocket launcher. Excellent.

"I took the liberty of looking through the ship's computer. Apparently these mercs were hired by something called the "Shadow Broker." Do you know what that is?"

Jane sighed. "I do," she said. "And it's not good news. Do you know where they were supposed to drop my body off?" It was strange talking about herself as an object, but she supposed that was what she was up until the moment Nox brought her back.

"Someplace called Omega station."

"Oh!" Jane checked the ship's nav system. "That's only a few systems over, we should get there in about a day and a half."

It seemed, according to what Nox had said, that ships in her universe went faster or at least could go farther than those it was familiar with. Jane could not imagine being restricted to a single solar system like that. Then again, Nox was apparently completely unfamiliar with the Mass Effect, which meant that it was quite possible that the very fabrics of their universes were different.

This did not explain how Jane could access abilities granted by a machine-god (for so it seemed the Traveler to be) in another reality, but now was not the time for such mysteries.

"Excellent," Nox said. "In the meantime, I'm going to see if I can find anything else useful." It disappeared, almost melting into the ship's terminal. Moment later, it reappeared, chirping thoughtfully. "Do you think you could ever build me a shell?" it asked.

"A shell?"

"You know," it said, "another shape for me. Just so I have the options."

It disappeared again.

"I'm not a machinist," Jane said apologetically. "But, if I find any of my friends who are again, they can probably figure something out."

"Thanks," it said. "I really do appreciate it."

What was wrong with its current shape? Jane wondered. A small, white machine made of interlocking cubes, sometimes dissolving, sometimes expanding, seemed fairly versatile and yet hard to replicate with any tech she was familiar with. Like a technology which Nox had called transmat, while her reality had faster ship, its had apparently mastered a way of breaking and recreating matter which seemed utterly impossible to Jane. A shell for Nox would have to be able to work with its various abilities, and she genuinely did not know whether that could be done with her reality's tech.

Of course, hers was a reality also lacking in cryptarchs and engrams, a concept Jane still couldn't quite grasp, which meant finding ways to augment her and Nox's light with equipment would be much more difficult.

Coming back to life had failed to solve any of Jane's problems other than the state of death itself and had also opened up a whole new host of complications.

She probably should have been more concerned or afraid than she was, considering she had no idea what had destroyed the_ Normandy_ or if it was still out there, but she honestly could not feel anything other than excitement and the desire to get at the bottom of the various mysteries she found herself once more at the center of.

Was she different, now that she had died and come back? She had her biotic implants, her omnitool. Her hands and face and eyes were the same, as she had confirmed, or thought she had confirmed, in a mirror in the ship's bathroom. Her hair was still bright red.

She didn't feel different. According to Nox, most ghosts deleted the memories of their guardians—it had not because of its panic at being in a strange place—but it had promised that it had changed nothing in her mind.

These thoughts, she decided, were not helpful. If she ever found herself with a quiet moment, a thought which almost made her smile, she would ponder that more. For now, she had to try not to fall asleep and listen to the faint hum of Nox working.

Hopefully, she would find something she knew at Omega. It had, it seemed, been a few weeks at least since her death, according to the time in the ship's computer, but the crash had only been yesterday for her, and she wanted desperately to know whether who of her friends had made it out alive.

She had died, and someone had put a price on her body. That was, if nothing else, a sign that the war she fought had not ended with Saren's death, and thanks to Nox, it would not end with hers, either.

The bodies were found an hour later when they failed to check in with base camp.

They noticed the stolen ship immediately, the missing weapons soon after. Most of the dead mercs had been shot in the chest or head, but one had had her helmet partially melted into her face.

Like all soldiers, of any organization, their omnitools came equipped with recorders, and the Blue Sun mercenaries watched in horror the woman in flickering hologram declared herself Jane Shepard before massacring the whole group of them.

This was not supposed to happen. Jane Shepard was dead, and it was their job to bring her back. It was supposed to be simple, one of the simplest jobs these mercs had had in a long time. Unlike living marks, corpses were not supposed to be able to fight back or summon strange light with their hands.

"We have to warn the guys back at Omega," one said.

"They're already fucked," the another said.

"Should we pursue?" the first asked. Her companion shook her head.

"This is way beyond the scope of the contract," she said. "We give a warning, and then we head back. Hope to beat her there."

"What if we don't?"

She found that she had no answer.

* * *

_Thank you for reading! I couldn't find any good information on how fast ships move between galaxies (I'm sure there's something buried on a forum somewhere, but that's still just speculations) but considering each game is supposed to take place over the course of a year and the player spends a lot of time moving around, I assumed that within single clusters it does not take very long indeed. I will take corrections on this, but only polite ones. I've already altered the time given somewhat thanks to some helpful comments from a friend.  
Please leave reviews, they're one way to catch mistakes, anyhow. _


	2. A Miracle

_Thanks for all the reviews and favorites! I really appreciate them. In reply to the issue of memory deletion, I'm going to justify that by saying Nox doesn't necessarily know what it's talking about; it seems to be a fairly young ghost, and that might just be its assumptions. And there is a degree of ambiguity to canon, considering, for example, Eris Morn's slow retrieval of her memories and Drifter's (admittedly biased) view of what his ghost might be doing to him. In any case, Shepard most likely has her memories because she was a fresh corpse (to put it crudely!) and probably also due to her distance from the traveler. _

_Finally, to defend my notion that Destiny ships are not as fast—and this isn't a diss on humanity, by the way, they obviously have other priorities—most humans/awoken/etc we see have barely gone farther out than Nessus, and there appears to be very little interstellar travel for humans (which of course makes sense, Darkness and all that) and I don't think the few seconds we see of travel is the real in-game travel time. After all, that would mean the red war takes about twenty-five hours, and that does not sound right. _

_As to whether anything else from the Destiny universe will appear, well, that remains to be seen, alongside the very important question of how exactly ghost got here (I'm curious as to what you folks think about that myself). More important, however, is getting Shepard back to the people she cares about. _

* * *

Omega came into solid view in the same way as all large objects in space: slowly, then all at once.

"Whoa," Nox said. "It's amazing."

Docking was easy. Omega had come by its reputation as a place where no one cared too much about what one was up to honestly enough (one of the few honest things about it), and so all Jane had to say was that she was Blue Sun, here to report, and no one questioned her.

She and Nox had spent their day of travel combing through the bounty out on her body (interrupted, at least for her, by a much-needed nap). Part of the language involved meeting an agent of the Broker in a back room in the lower levels of a club called Afterlife as soon as the body was in any group's possession. Jane had for a moment imagined trying to cash in the bounty on herself but would probably just end with guns pointed at her head. She was wanted dead, more than anything else.

What she had been unable to discover was why the Shadow Broker wanted her corpse. He did not want things for himself, which meant there had to be a "buyer" out there.

Her tentative plan was to go to this room and confront the agent. Hopefully, they would be more talkative than other pawns of that man had been, and she would be able to move on from there. In service to this, she had replaced her N7 armor with a set she had found on board the ship. She would miss her old armor, of course, but it could be replaced, and Alliance military gear would stick out in a place like Omega.

She would also have to find another ship, which would likely be complicated by the fact that the Blue Sun were almost definitely aware of what she had done.

Needless to say, she was out of the docking area very quickly. She had no idea what the standard operating procedure for that particular gang was, but she imagined that eventually they would realize that hers was the stolen ship and she was the woman back from the dead.

Her omnitool downloaded a map of the station from the local network automatically. She took a moment to watch Nox scan the walls, familiarizing itself with the space.

"Afterlife is close," she said. "You'll need to stay out of sight. Even with these abilities, I can't take on an entire space station."

Jane was glad to be on a station again, even one like this. Growing up in space, she had never quite gotten used to living on planets, and she never seemed to have any particularly good time on them, especially not recently. Recycled air and cramped quarters were far preferable to infinite plains of ice and cold that never quite reached her.

"I can still talk to you inside your head," Nox said. "And you can talk to me. What's your story?"

Jane sighed. "I don't know," she said.

"Okay," Nox said. It vanished.

Getting inside Afterlife turned out to be a bigger issue than finding it. The elcor bouncer mainly prefaced their sentences with "unimpressed" and other such adjectives when responding to the pleas of people hoping to gain entry, and Jane was not sure her story would fare any better. Of course, if worse came to worse she could probably find some other way to get inside, but she very much preferred not to have to resort to that.

"Hello," she said. "I'm here for the meeting."

"Curious, which meeting?" The elcor ignored the human harassing them. "Neutral, you will have to be more specific than that."

"Blue Sun. It's about Jane Shepard."

The elcor blinked slowly at her. "Amused. Blue Sun business? Many people claim to have that."

"I can vouch for her," a voice said.

Jane turned around. She was now very confused. She did not recognize the voice, and she was certain that she did not know anyone on Omega, unless one of her crew had moved there in the time since her death.

The human woman wore a white jumpsuit that was the kind of not-quite-armor that only people who either didn't get into fights much or who were powerful enough biotics to create effective barriers wore.

"Amused, and you are?"

"Miranda Lawson. Aria knows me."

Jane knew in the absolutely vaguest terms who Aria was. She definitely knew enough to be afraid of her, and to know that throwing her name around was not something one did lightly. Whoever this woman was, she was probably not lying.

"Neutral, this is true. Welcoming, come in."

"Follow me," Miranda said, gesturing towards the door and ignoring the indignant human man, now back to arguing with the elcor.

Once the two women had passed through the first set of doors leading into the club, Jane stopped in her tracks.

"Who the hell are you?"

"Someone very interested in finding out how exactly Jane Shepard survived a collector ship attack." She smirked. "Are you surprised I recognize you?" She started walking again, forcing Jane to keep up with her.

"Somewhat."

Miranda nodded. "The gear was a nice touch, but the Blue Sun have already sent a warning out about you. You weren't exactly subtle back on Alchera."

Jane shrugged. "I didn't exactly have a choice. If you've seen an omnirecording of it, I told them not to shoot. How did you see it?" She didn't look Blue Sun.

"I'm not here to judge you, Shepard, I'm here to keep you from walking into a trap set for someone else." She pointedly did not answer Jane's last question.

"What do you mean?"

The second door opened, and Jane found herself briefly overwhelmed by the noise and lightshow that was Afterlife club. Dancers of many genders and races writhed to sound that could be barely described as music, hundreds of conversations combined into a low, droning hum, and colors changed constantly.

Death, it seemed, had made her less tolerant than she usually was, or perhaps this was the sort of place designed to throw someone off her guard. In the noise, she did not notice that Miranda had once more not answered a question.

"I don't like it here," Nox said in her head.

"I know," Jane replied. "I don't either."

She followed Miranda across the dancefloor towards a set of steps guarded by a batarian in a similar uniform to Jane's.

"We're here to meet with your boss," Miranda said.

"Uh, right," the batarian said. "He's busy."

"I'm sure," Miranda said. "That doesn't matter. This is about Jane Shepard."

She swept the baffled guard out of the way, Jane following after her.

This door led to a much quieter room. It was lit normally, and the walls muffled the music from the other room. Jane barely noticed this change, however, because she realized that she and Miranda had walked into the middle of a gunfight.

Bodies wearing broken Blue Sun armor lay scattered across the floor. Those who were still alive were concentrating their fire on a makeshift barricade, too busy to notice the entrance of two more people.

"Seems the door guy wasn't exactly hired for his brains," Jane said. Miranda laughed.

"I'm sure he wasn't," she answered. "This is what I meant by trap."

The problem facing whoever the Blue Sun were trying to kill was that they were few and the Blue Sun comparatively infinite. Eventually, they would run out of ammo and energy, and that would be it.

Of course, that sort of plan depended on only allies appearing to help.

Miranda confirmed Jane's earlier suspicions when a barrier materialized around her. Jane did something similar, hoping that it would be the typical blue and not the strange purple she could also now access. Her use of her new powers had been instinctual, and now was not the time to reveal them.

She had dealt with groups like this countless times before using only her biotics. If Miranda was as powerful as Jane hoped, they would be no problem at all.

With their attention briefly off their target, the people behind the barricade started to retaliate, and the remaining Blue Suns quickly fell, joining their companions on the floor. This was a small room, and biotic attacks could cover a lot of ground.

Jane could not help but smile, though she felt oddly dissatisfied at not having used her Light in a demonstrable way. She would have to figure out a means of combining her abilities. No one would notice blue biotics tinged slightly purple, probably.

Had the barricaded people not been friendly, Jane would have felt very foolish. Instead, a familiar blue figure stepped out, accompanied by a drell.

"Liara!" Jane said, unable to help herself. She took a step forward, arms slightly outstretched, before realizing that now was not exactly the time for hugs.

"Jane," Liara said. "I'm so happy to see you." She pulled Jane into a hug, ignoring Jane's hesitation. "I saw the recording, but it was so hard to believe. You've been gone…" Her voice trailed off into Jane's shoulder, and she pulled away. "This is Feron. He works for the Shadow Broker but has been helping me."

"You weren't exactly subtle," the drell said, his voice clicking. Had he been with anyone else she would not have trusted him whatsoever, but she could not believe Liara was working with the Blue Sun. Feron was, presumably, some kind of double agent, and therefore slightly less of a threat.

"You are the second person to tell me that in the last half hour," Jane said. "What does the Shadow Broker want with my body?" That was what this was all about, right? Her corpse?

What a mostly wrecked corpse lying cold and dead on a nothing planet could possibly do she still had no idea. Obviously, now that she was alive again, the information in her head was valuable to a certain kind of person, but her corpse? She was not that special, no matter what some might insist.

She would be playing catch-up for a long time, she thought. The three other people in the room seemed to have a much better idea of what was going on.

"The collectors hired him," Feron said. It was hard, from how he blinked, for Jane not to interpret his speech as rushed and strange, but that was her primate brain reacting incorrectly to vastly different body language. "They were not the only ones after your remains, however."

"They weren't?" Why would the collectors want her, anyway? They trafficked in odd things, of course, but she had never heard about them going after corpses before. Yet they at least made sense. They were the collectors. They were strange, even to the strangest, and so while it was incomprehensible and weird, it wasn't surprising. "Do you mean the Alliance?"

To her surprise, that made Feron laugh, a high, rasping sound. "No," he said. "Not at all. Your Alliance declared you tragically dead the day after the first escape shuttle appeared, doing their best the bury it all." He nodded at Liara. "Your crew did not exactly stay together."

"There was no point to it," Liara said. "I wished to find you, and the others went their separate ways. I am in touch with Tali, but the rest I have not spoken to since the funeral." She looked as confused as Jane felt.

Jane resisted the immediate, obvious question, instead waiting for one of the three to tell her who, then, if not the Alliance.

The answer did not come, and Jane made an irritated noise. "Who, then?"

"My employer," Miranda said. "Cerberus."

"No," Jane said. Something unpleasant tightened in her gut. "Are you going to kill me?"

That seemed to genuinely catch Miranda off guard. "Excuse me?"

"You wanted my corpse. Are you going to kill me?"

Miranda shook her head. "No, no. Shepard—we were going to bring you back."

"That's not possible," Nox said. It took effort for Jane not to react to its words. "You were destroyed."

"How?"

Miranda shrugged. "Any means necessary."

Jane let herself imagine waking up under Cerberus's care. It wasn't a happy picture.

"Well," she said. "It seems everyone was excited over nothing. I am here, after all."

"Yes," Miranda said. "You are." She smiled, before her expression changed to one of mild disgust as she looked around herself. "This is not an ideal location to talk," she said.

"We should probably leave the station for a while, in any case," Liara said. "We did just kill a good number of Blue Sun."

"Mm. Shepard, would you object to speaking with me aboard my ship?"

"Not at all. Can Liara and Feron come?" She wanted at least one ally. Feron was not an ally, but Liara was working with him, at least. She did not exactly trust Miranda, but Jane had the feeling she could probably take the biotic in a fight if it was truly necessary.

"Of course," Miranda said. Jane wondered if she felt as generous as she spoke in that moment.

The batarian doorman was gone by the time the four of them exited the room.

Miranda's ship turned out to be of about the same size as the ship Jane had stolen, but of better make. Her pilot was apparently still on-board Omega, acquiring various odds and ends. Liara sent Feron to find him, not as a way of getting him out of the way but because he knew his way around a weapon and had a better idea of Omega's general layout than her.

"How are you alive?" Miranda asked. She felt no need for niceties; this was the information she needed to know, the most baffling part of the equation by far.

"Can we trust her?" Jane asked Nox internally.

"No," Nox said. "But you're mostly worried about people freaking out, right? She doesn't seem the kind to freak out."

Jane took a moment to look at Miranda. She knew she was taking a strange amount of time to reply, but in her defense "How are you not dead?" was a strange question under the best of circumstances.

"I'm honestly more worried about people trying to steal you."

"They won't." The absolute confidence in Nox's voice was almost worrying.

"Alright." Jane said this last part out loud and opened her hand.

Nox shone its light in Miranda's face.

"Hello!" it chirped. "I'm Nox. I'm Jane's ghost."

No one spoke for a long moment.

Liara was the first to speak. "What are you?" she asked with the kind of curiosity that reminded Jane of when she'd talk about her old archaeological projects. It was kind of cute, honestly.

"Pretty much what I just said," Nox replied. "I brought Jane back to life."

"How recently was this?" That was Miranda, more businesslike and less wondering than Miranda.

"Yesterday," Jane said.

It took the two of them about fifteen minutes to explain with all the interruptions from their two listeners. "I don't know," and "another universe, I guess," weren't really satisfying answers, but that just meant Liara and Miranda were now in the same place as Jane.

"If I were still home, I would ask Jane to return to the City and defend humanity," Nox concluded. "Since I'm here, and the scope of things is a lot bigger, I'm willing to help save her world before trying to figure out how to get back to mine."

"These guardians have a religious significance?" Liara asked.

"You could say that," Nox said. "Mostly, extraordinary enemies need extraordinary heroes."

Miranda laughed. "That sounds like propaganda."

"Maybe it was. I'm pretty young, in the grand scheme of things." It sunk back into Jane's skin. "Here is the important part: I am going to keep Jane alive, for as long as I can. Forever, if that's possible, or at least until the battle is won."

That brought even Jane up short. "Forever?" she asked.

It reappeared, blinking in vague confusion. "Did I not tell you? You're immortal, now. Well." It laughed mechanically. "The tricky kind of immortal that means you have to make sure I don't die."

Jane looked at Liara. "Oh," they both said in unison.

Something Jane had not told Nox, nor was willing to bring up in front of Miranda, a virtual stranger, was that Liara had asked Jane once if they could spend their nights together, and Jane had replied that it was too strange to think about how much longer Liara would live than her.

That, it seemed, was no longer the case.

"I didn't know," Jane said.

Nox made an embarrassed noise. "I thought it was implied," it said. "I would have explained better if I had realized."

"But you can die?" Miranda asked.

"Yes," Jane said. "I just don't want to."

Miranda pursed her lips in thought for a moment. "If you are amenable," she said. "I think you should work with us."

"Why?" Jane said. She looked at Liara. They needed to talk, and soon.

"You obviously have abilities most people do not," she said, with some degree of humor. "That was the case before all of this—that is why we were willing to sink so much into retrieving you—but now you really can help us."

Jane shook her head. "If you know that much about me," she said. "You know that I've always worked with aliens and do not agree with you." Everyone knew two things about Cerberus: they were wealthy beyond imagination and they were human supremacists.

Miranda shrugged. "I understand how our organization gained that reputation, but that is not really what we are. We want to defend humanity against what threatens us, and right now, humanity is threatened." Jane could not exactly read her expression. "Do you know what killed you, Jane Shepard?"

Jane shook her head. "No," she said. She leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms across her chest. "I take it you do?" She looked at Liara, who shook her head.

Miranda nodded. "The collectors killed you, Shepard," she said. "They killed you, and they hunted you, and we are not sure why, but we know it's connected to the human colonies that have been disappearing." She spread her hands. "You spent a year hunting down a rogue Spectre and killed a Reaper. If anyone can figure out what they're doing, it's you."

Jane wasn't sure what to say to that. It was still hard for her to think of herself as someone particularly special. She had just done what had needed to be done, and it wasn't all her doing.

"I had my crew, and I had my ship," she said. "I don't have either, anymore."

Miranda smiled. "What if I told you I could at least give you one of those?" she asked. She nodded to Liara. "And of course, gathering the other should not be too difficult."

"I would." Jane swallowed nervously. "I would assume you were trying to trick me, honestly. I was there. The _Normandy _is gone." This was hard to talk about. It had only been a day, really. She could still hear Joker's protests as she dragged him away from his ship. That had hurt.

"Yes," Miranda says. "But Cerberus is resourceful, and we built you a ship."

Jane Shepard was many things. She was a spacer, someone born aboard ship. She was a biotic, adept in the strange abilities given her by accidents of birth. She was even now something like a guardian, a so-called Titan.

She was also human, and she ached for her crew and for the _Normandy_. If Cerberus could give Jane her ship and friends back—who could blame her for saying yes?


	3. Herr Doctor

_Jane meets the Illusive Man.  
Apologies for the long delay! I have a lot of stuff going on, as you probably know if you follow my Ao3 (which you should! That's where all the stuff that isn't... fit... for ffn goes).  
I'm letting myself write shorter chapters, which will hopefully mean less of a delay between chapters 3 and 4._ _Thank for reading!_

* * *

"We have Shepard," Miranda told the hollow image of her employer.

The Illusive Man smiled, a smoldering cigarette held between his fingers. "That's good," he said. "I was worried she would get herself killed, and so soon after she returned to us."

Miranda smiled thinly. Of course, he knew. She knew because Feron knew everyone and had access to Blue Sun networks. He knew, presumably, because he had access to those same networks.

"I think she was just lucky," Miranda said. "She couldn't explain how she survived, but she stole a ship and now she's here, with me. One of her old crew-mates is with us, too, which should make adjustment to the new ship easier." She didn't mention the little AI, that it had a name and could speak and apparently made Shepard immortal.

This secret, she could sense already, was quite valuable.

"And tracking down her old pilot is going as planned?"

"Of course." The man known most commonly as Joker had been grounded. Like Shepard, the idea of having a ship again was too much for him to resist, even if it wasn't the ship he'd apparently almost tried to go down with.

"Good." He put out the cigarette out of view and stood up, crossing his arms behind his back. "Bring her to speak with me, when you arrive," he said. "I suppose I should be grateful. She seems to have saved me a great deal of money."

With that, he cut the feed, leaving Miranda in the dark.

Jane was surprised when Miranda gave her essentially free reign of the small ship during their journey. It would probably have been smart to poke around, see if there was anything on Cerberus that she could find without tripping any alarms (she had never been the computer expert of the crew, that was certain), but instead she found herself sitting across a small table from Liara.

"I don't want you to think I trust them," Jane said. She'd already said this, but she wanted to make sure Liara understood. More than any other member of her crew, Jane cared what Liara thought about her. "I know what they've done. I just."

If she could get her ship back it could be like nothing changed. A few weeks or months wasn't that long; she was lucky to have been dead only a little while, and now she could just continue on with her life like nothing had ever happened.

"Have you contacted the Alliance?"

Jane looked away and down at her hands, sitting on the table in half-clenched fists. "No," she said. "I can't seem to bring myself to." Why had no one gone looking for her?

"I haven't heard from Ashley since she was promoted," Liara said quietly. "I haven't heard from the others at all. I was so focused on finding you…" She stopped mid-sentence, her eyes distant. "If we could only figure out what happened to her," she said, referring to the _Normandy_. "Do you know who died?"

Jane shook her head. "I could just ask you, I guess, but I just…"

Liara gently covered Jane's hands with hers. "I understand," she said.

"Oh," Jane said. "Right." She looked away, unable to deal with Liara's sympathetic expression. "Does it get any easier?"

Liara sighed. "I don't know," she said. "And I have lived with this knowledge my whole life, while you have only the potential of old age to stare at." She smiled. Jane found herself returning the smile, even as she felt wetness in the corner of her eyes. "I will send you the list, and you can look at it when you're ready. For now…" Her smile turned impish, and she clapped her hands together, reminding Jane abruptly of how she had been when they had first met. "What do you say to running a few experiments with your powers?"

"What kind of experiments?" Jane stood, Nox popping into existence above her shoulder. Figuring out the new and exciting ways she could fight was, she thought, much less existentially stressful than the deaths of her crew or the future.

Liara pushed herself to her feet, her grin not changing. "Everything," she said. She shrugged. "Well, everything within reason."

Jane and Nox shared a glance. "I don't want to blow up the ship," Jane said carefully. "But there is something I know I can do…"

She let the purple dome from Alcherra flicker into existence. "It's like a barrier, but stronger?" she said. "I don't know if I can move it." She sighed, shaking her head. "Right now it seems to be mostly just I'm really good at punching, though," she admitted.

The mischievous glint in Liara's eyes did not waver. "Okay," she said. A crackling blue biotic barrier appear in front of her as she casually pushed aside the table they had been sitting at. "Let's see how quickly you can break this down. From personal experience, I know it takes a skilled biotic two minutes or so to take it down. And I've certainly never had it punched to depletion before. Can you do it faster?"

"You know," Jane said, striding quickly towards the asari. "I think I can still use my biotics." Gathering void energy around her left fist, she struck the center of Liara's barrier.

Liara staggered backwards one step, but the barrier did not drop. "Wow," she said, her eyes widening. "That was a lot." Her mischievous expression returned.

"Maybe I can finally match you," Jane said, also smiling. Another punch destroyed the barrier completely, leaving Liara breathing heavily.

"I feel the distinct urge to kiss you," Liara said, looking at her no longer glowing hands. "That may not be wise, however."

A surge of confused emotions filled Jane's chest, nearly staggering her. "I… wouldn't mind?"

Liara shook her head. "It's not a question of minding," she said. "I just want more time." She touched Jane's shoulder before bringing her hand distractedly up to her red hair. "And I want it to be somewhere we can call ours, something we choose to do."

"You've changed," Jane said.

Liara shrugged. "Grief is strange," she said.

"I'm here," Jane said. "I'm not going anywhere." She brought her hand up to touch Liara's briefly, before dropping it again.

"I can confirm that," Nox said, blipping into existence.

Liara's smile was stranger than it had been moments before. "You can't promise that," she said.

Jane hung her head. "I'm sorry,"

"It's alright," Liara said. "We'll just have to find who did this to you." She took her hand away.

"Sounds good," Jane said.

"This is not—" Liara started, apologetically, when Miranda's voice came on over the ship's intercom.

"We will be at the station shortly," she said. "I suggest you all gather your things. We will hopefully not return to this ship once our business there has been completed."

"Where will we be going?" Jane tried to ask, but the connection had already been cut. She sighed, glancing quickly at the speaker embedded high in the wall. "More mysteries." She shook her head in Nox's direction. "At least you're a helpful mystery."

"I try!" it replied.

The cockpit of Miranda's ship was cramped, but not so cramped that it could not fit two extra humanoids. Feron was further back, staring at his omnitool in apparent frustration. Jane felt a vague desire to ask him what he was doing but found herself distracted by the sudden appearance of the Cerberus station on the viewscreen.

It was bigger than Jane had expected.

"How do you keep this kind of place hidden?" she asked, glad Miranda couldn't see her eyes widen behind the visor of her helmet. Her pilot rolled their eyes, but didn't say anything. They didn't seem particularly interested in either their boss or her friends.

"No one comes out here," Miranda said. In response to Liara's skeptical silence, she added, "Cloaking technology similar to that of the Normandy. If that fails, very big guns."

Jane nodded. That wasn't an answer she liked at all (how would Cerberus have tech like that? Did they have spies in Alliance R&D?) but it was one that made sense.

They docked in silence, interrupted only by Miranda saying at the last minute, "It's in your hands if you tell my employer about your friend."

Something in Jane's heart clenched. How could she have been so stupid to have shown Miranda Nox? She didn't know as much about Cerberus as she would have liked, but she knew that the guy who ran them was dangerous, and probably more than a little bit crazy. He would want to steal it, even if Miranda did not.

The knot in her chest eased someone when Liara gently put her hand on Jane's shoulder, before letting it drop to her side again.

Feron disappeared almost the moment they were on board the station.

"I thought he was yours?" Jane asked Liara, trying and failing to whisper.

Instead of answering, Liara sighed. "These are not good people you are allying yourself with," she said, speaking out loud the thing they were both thinking, both had been thinking since they boarded Lawson's ship.

They were met, not by the Illusive Man, as Jane half-expected, but by a man with short-cropped hair who called himself Jacob.

"Were you Alliance?" she asked, recognizing his grip and the way he held himself.

He laughed. "More or less. Cerberus lets me do more good."

"That's not what I've heard." Or experienced, she thought, but did not say.

"Do I reveal myself to him?" Nox asked, internally.

"No," Jane answered, grateful they'd figured out subvocal conversation. "Not yet. Not here." There was something about the station that made her uncomfortable. She was not at the heart of Cerberus-not even close-but this did not mean she would let her guard down.

Jacob's expression didn't change. "There's more to us than you've heard," he said. "Follow me. Miranda will join you both again shortly." He looked briefly at Liara, but was apparently professional enough not to ask why Jane was not alone, if that was even what he was thinking.

"Where's the mysterious boss of yours?"

"I don't know. Miranda will explain."

He resisted any further attempts at conversation, and the three of them lapsed into silence as they walked.

"My apologies if you assumed you would meet the Illusive Man," Miranda said when they joined her. "He is quite understandably paranoid and does not like to disclose his physical location to any but the most trusted members of the organization, among which even I am not counted." She smiled as though she were sharing a joke. "It is not how he got the name, but it helped." She looked pointedly at Liara. "He wishes to speak with Commander Shepard alone."

Jane felt sheer stubbornness flood through her and she frowned. "No," she said. "I want backup."

Miranda laughed as though Jane had said something funny. "Speaking with him is not exactly dangerous," she said. "Are you always this difficult?" Amusement was better than anger, but not by much if it still didn't get her anywhere.

"Absolutely," Jane said. "Ask anyone on the Council." Now that would be an unpleasant conversation. Pushing her so swiftly under the rug would not look good for them, especially now that she was back under equally mysterious circumstances as her death.

She refused to break Miranda's gaze. She'd been stubborn before her death, and now she was a semi-immortal superbeing.

"Fine," Miranda said. "Don't say I didn't warn you."

"The Illusive Man's opinion of aliens is rather notorious," Liara said, but she didn't seem particularly interested in dissuading Jane.

Jane shrugged. "He presumably knows where he can stuff that opinion." Grabbing Liara pointedly by the hand, she stepped into the center of what she now recognized as an advanced holographic communications rig and look up.

"You've saved my quite a bit of money," The Illusive Man said, removing the cigarette from his mouth. "I would have brought you back, no matter what, but now here you are." He smiled, his image leaning towards Jane. It morphed quickly into a frown as he recognized Liara. "Why is she with you?"

"I don't like being alone," Jane said. She stared at him, refusing to let herself feel intimidated by the setup of their mutual holograms. "I was told you would tell me why Cerberus wants me so much. Explain."

The Illusive Man quickly wiped the grimace from his expression. "I suppose I did want _you_ back. Are you always this difficult?"

Liara barely stifled a laugh. Jane grinned. "Yes," she said. "Your subordinate asked me something quite similar just now."

He sighed. "The Normandy was not the only human ship to disappear," he said. "Have you heard of the Collectors?"

"Only distantly," Jane said, as Liara flinched. "Don't they mostly keep to their own part of space?"

"They used to. They've been more active, recently. And I think they want you."

"Why?"

"I have no idea. I'm just glad we got to you first." He looked to the side, apparently consulting something. "We assumed... retrieving... you would take a great deal longer, and so we do not have everything we meant to give you." He frowned again, tapping at his cigarette. "How do you feel about experimental vessels, Shepard?" he asked.

"The Normandy was one," she said. "Are you giving me a ship?" She couldn't help her excitement at the thought, not when memories of the Normandy in flames filled her thoughts at a moment's notice.

He nodded. "It's not as complete as I would like, and you will have to forgive us for some of the onboard V.I.'s... quirks... but I believe it will be to your liking." He looked at her for a long moment. "Can I trust you, Jane Shepard?"

Jane took a long moment to think about the question. "Yes," she finally said. "You can." To do what, she didn't elaborate upon, and at the Illusive Man's smile, she knew he'd make his own assumptions.

"Good. Miranda will help your adjustment. Farewell." With that, he cut the connection, leaving Jane and Miranda in the dark.


End file.
